Indiana University Libraries: Quickly and Easily

It's been quite some time and I'm sorry to have left you hanging. I am obviously been very busy to school and therefore sadly failed my Julie and Julia challenge. However someone once said if you don't succeed try and try again, that's exactly what I intend on doing. So starting today April 15 of 2014 for one week I will blog… Won't you please join me on this journey? Today I think I will blog about IU! More specifically our IU libraries system of libraries. Why am I to do this you ask? Well let me tell you!

Being an education major here at Indiana University, I encounter a lot of written assignments mostly in the forms of papers whether their opinion or researched based. If you add on the fact that my education concentrations are history and theater, well the history concentration alone almost doubles the number of papers I have to complete. I think you're smart enough to know where this is going, our libraries are fantastic. More specifically our librarians are outstanding, they are quintessential to surviving college especially here in Indiana University.

Let me tell you a few short experiences that I've had with our librarians that has just made me love them so very much. This past fall semester as some of you, if you are local, may have read in our newspaper I organized Judy Shepard to come speak on our campus. To be able to pull off a campus wide event such as a lecturer presentation you have to raise funds to do so. I had no idea even where to begin me in writing grants or filling out specific paperwork to obtain these funds. One of our amazing librarians helps me very graciously not only finding material on how to write grants but also figuring out which grants I could apply for. Thanks to her I had these in my back pocket and thankfully never had to use them, since IU and its varying offices were more than supportive.

This spring semester I had a 10 page paper in history of the Holocaust to write. As many of you may know I identify as a gay man, If not let's feel free to read about it here as IU made me feel I had such a great place to be who I was. So with my professor's permission I researched homosexual persecution during the time of World War II because it really interested me. Let me tell you, one of the hardest things for me as an undergraduate student is research. When you go as far back as World War II you get a lot of documents that are pertinent to that language. In the case of the Holocaust and World War II on the side of persecution they were in German, however the history librarian, and a lot of her other colleagues helped me find primary source and secondary source documents that were in my native language. I am forever indebted to her!

I hope that my stories have inspired you to go to the library, even now while you may not be in college. Librarians are there because they love what they do, and they love helping inquiring minds search for vast and expansive knowledge. Check out the Indiana University libraries homepage here, and I hope to see you in the stacks